I’ve been researching and writing about dehumanization for the past ten years or so. During this time, I’ve argued that people dehumanize others by conceiving of them as less-than-human beings—in a literal rather than a figurative sense. Some scholars are skeptical of my claim, and hold that dehumanization, as I’ve described it, doesn’t exist. One important reason for their skepticism has to do with a seeming contradiction. Those who describe others as less than human also implicitly (or even explicitly) acknowledge their victims’ humanity. The skeptics conclude that these people don’treallythink of these others as subhuman animals, and that they’re really just trying to degrade or humiliate the targeted group ofhuman beingsby characterizing them as inferior, subhuman entities.

This position is nowadays associated with the work of Cornell University philosopher Kate Manne (see her 2018 bookDown Girl: The Logic of Misogyny)，但实际上它已经存在很长时间了。The eminent historian of racism Winthrop D. Jordan devoted a whole section of his 1968 bookWhite Over Blackto an account of Europeans’ descriptions of Africans as soulless, subhuman brutes, but then concluded that “American colonials no more thought Negroes were beasts than did European scientists and missionaries” because:

甚至在种植园里，黑人也像其他人一样走路、锄地、说话和繁殖。无论奴隶制在多大程度上贬低了黑人，黑人和白人生活和关系中的每一个日常事件都无可否认地表明，黑人也是一个人。

有太多的历史证据表明，许多白人认为黑人是次等人，以至于乔丹很难坚持自己的怀疑论立场。We see this in his statement that “the discouragingly expensive mortality among the Negroes, especially in the West Indies and also in the rice swamps in South Carolina, tended to make Negroes seem almost non-human,” and:

The cruelties of slavery inevitably produced a sense of disassociation. To the horrified witness of a scene of torture, the victim becomes a “poor devil,” a “mangled creature.” He is no longer a man. He can no longer be human because to credit him with one’s own human attributes would be too horrible.

问题就在这里。On one hand, there’s evidence that slaveholders accepted that Black people were human beings, but on the other there is evidence thatthe very same people认为黑人是次等人类Faced with this contradiction, it’s tempting to conclude that Whites didn’ttrulybelieve that Blacks were subhuman, and that that the women and men who described Black people as less than human couldn’t have meant this literally.

Although this conclusion might seem solid, it’s based on a shaky foundation. In the realm of pure logic, a proposition and its opposite can’t both be true. Logically speaking, nobody can be both human and subhuman, because each of these conditions rules the other one out. But dehumanization isn’t logical. It’s psychological. And human psychology is riddled with contradictions. Trying to squeeze facts about human psychology into the rigid framework of logic does violence to our understanding of ourselves and gets in the way of coming to grips with some of the most destructive features of human life—including (but not limited to) dehumanization.

It’s a fact that dehumanizers acknowledge the humanness of those whom they dehumanize. And we can use this insight to deepen our understanding of the dehumanizing process. Yale University historian David Brion Davis was on the right track when he argued in his 2014 bookThe Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipationthat Whites were in a contradictory state of mind when they dehumanized Blacks. “Since the victims of this process are perceived as ‘animalized humans,’” he wrote, “this double consciousness would probably involve a contradictory shifting back and forth in the recognition of humanity.” It’s quite common to find racist writers of the past referring to Black people both as men and as beasts, sometimes in the space of a single sentence (for example, Hegel’s characterization of the African as an “animal man,” a man who exists “in a state of animality”).

The same contradictory attitude is plain to see more recent outbreaks of dehumanization. In 1993 residents of the Romanian town of Hadereni attacked Roma residents. A mob of around five hundred people burned down thirteen houses, clubbed a Roma man to death and burned two other menalive. A woman named Maria, who proudly took part in the pogrom, told a reporter from the British newspaperThe Independent:“如果我们烧掉更多的人，而不仅仅是房子，情况会更好....我们没有谋杀——你怎么能把杀害吉普赛人称为谋杀?....你知道，吉普赛人不是真正的人。他们总是互相残杀。他们是罪犯、次等人、害虫。”请注意玛利亚是如何在将罗马人描述为人类和将他们描述为次等人类之间摇摆不定的。首先，她称他们为“人”，然后说他们“不是真正的人”。接下来，她称他们为“罪犯”——这是专门针对人类的术语，但随后又声称他们是“次等人类，害虫”。We can see the same pattern in Donald Trump’s remark about MS-13 gang members that “You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals.”

As insightful as Davis’ position is, I think that he still concedes too much to human rationality. He describes dehumanizers asalternatingbetween conceiving of others as human and conceiving of them as subhuman, but there are good reasons to think that dehumanizers think of those whom they dehumanize assimultaneouslyhuman and subhuman. This is blatantly irrational, but crucial for understanding how dehumanization works. I’ll explain why in next month’s installment.

Image byShaun FinnfromPixabay